


Play your memory like a piper

by partyghost (Arokel)



Series: Always At My Heels [2]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bobby | Trevor Wilson Defense Squad, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, He's still kind of a jerk though, Insensitive terms for mental illness, Kinda uplifting at the end, Post-Season/Series 01, This isn't sad so much as introspective but, maybe? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27809563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/partyghost
Summary: Ghosts can't answer back. So Trevor Wilson answers for them.
Relationships: Bobby | Trevor Wilson & Luke Patterson, Bobby | Trevor Wilson & Reggie
Series: Always At My Heels [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2073294
Comments: 23
Kudos: 99





	Play your memory like a piper

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't write this immediately after waking up from anesthesia, but I did _post_ it immediately after, so I'm very sorry for any errors.

Trevor Wilson wasn’t going crazy. Probably. Or if he was, it was a very recent development, in which case he probably ought to just ride it out and see where it lead him. Because he hadn’t been crazy _before_ all that ‘hello Bobby’ bullshit, and anybody would react poorly to seeing their name spelled out on a bathroom mirror.

So he probably wasn’t crazy, even if some people might think a forty-two-year-old-man religiously attending his teenage daughter’s former friend’s fake-hologram concerts veered a little far towards ‘too weird.’ But if this _was_ a midlife-psychotic break, he might as well enjoy it. He didn’t really need any more sports cars.

“I know you’re there.”

The air beside him didn’t speak. He hadn’t expected it to. But even without that confirmation, his brain still supplied him with a long-buried echo of Reggie’s petulant _no you don’t._

“And I know it’s just you, too.”

That was how it always used to go, when Luke and Trevor would come close enough to blows that Alex had to send them to separate rooms to calm down, or when Alex would get so worked up that he needed to storm off and sulk, even if the argument was his fault in the first place. It was always Reggie who came after them.

“I keep waiting for you to make a dumbass comment, but I guess you’re not going to,” Trevor said, laughing to himself, because what else was he supposed to do? He was sitting on a concrete step in a back alley behind a third-rate club, talking to a ghost who probably wasn’t even there.

 _Hey, I don’t make dumbass comments. I’m insightful,_ said the Reggie in his head.

“Yeah, you do. I bet you’re making one right now.”

The silence continued. Trevor tried to tell himself it was the silence of two people sitting next to each other, each too busy imagining how the other would respond to ever actually speak, not the silence of one person sitting alone talking to himself.

“I guess I probably do deserve it.”

_Well, you’re kind of a massive dick, so yeah._

No, that was wrong. Reggie would never say that. Luke would, without hesitation. Alex might, too, if he was feeling snarky enough. Never Reggie.

“It’s been so long I can’t even hallucinate you properly. How pathetic is that?” It was too dark for Reggie to seem him smile. The joke was on Trevor, anyway. “I used to see you everywhere. I’d walk down the street and I’d see three guys, and for just a minute I’d think it was you. Didn’t matter what they looked like; I _wanted_ them to be you so badly that for one second, they would be. And then I’d get closer, and one of them would be too blonde, or too short, and you’d be dead again.”

That was the good thing about talking to ghosts. You could say any crazy thing you wanted, and they just had to listen.

“I see a psychiatrist. Not because I need one, but because that’s just what people with this much money do. But I’ve never told him that.” Then, into a new kind of silence that felt more like censure than solitude, he admitted, “I really fucked up, didn’t I.”

_Yeah, Bobby._

Trevor wished he _was_ alone. The kind of things he wanted to confess weren’t things he wanted Reggie to hear. Luke, maybe, because Luke was no doubt furious and if anyone deserved an explanation it was him. But Reggie, who was always so much more sensitive than Alex even if he hid it behind bravado about as opaque as a paper lantern – Reggie would just be hurt.

“Is Luke mad at me?”

It was the question he had asked so many times before, back when there _was_ a Luke to hate him and forgive him and drive him fucking _insane._ He never would have thought he’d miss that. He never expected to ask it again.

_“Is Luke mad at me?”_

_“No duh, jackass.”_

And that would be Luke, in the doorway behind him, coming to sit beside Reggie.

_“Will you forgive me?”_

_“See my last comment re: no duh.”_

It wasn’t real anymore, but it still hurt.

“I tried not to miss you. I thought it would be easier if I didn’t. And then one day I just… forgot to.” It had been when Carrie was born, in the moment he transformed from a man burdened by the spirits of his teenage friends into a real adult, a man with a child to hold dear instead. And now there he was, burdened with them again.

Or maybe it had been years before that, when he stopped being Bobby, the one who got left behind. It had been easier if Bobby was dead too, if Trevor Wilson was like a man who had never known a band called Sunset Curve.

Survivor’s guilt was a bitch.

_Still not an excuse for stealing our music._

Trevor would have liked to believe that one would have been Reggie, because Reggie would have said it nicer.

“It was my music too,” Trevor said into that silence, but it sounded inadequate even to his ears. He couldn’t imagine what it sounded like to Reggie. “The record execs liked it. A breakout star who could play sold-out shows, not a dead band coasting on the heartbroken loyalty of fans who wouldn’t stick around after the tragedy wore off. They said it was the right choice.”

_Where’s your integrity, man? You could have honored our memory._

Trevor shook his head. It was kind of funny, if you looked at it cockeyed. “I probably would have done things differently if I’d known you’d come back to critique me.”

_Yeah, you never took constructive criticism very well._

“I know there’s no point in making excuses,” he said. He was so tired. He was alone, now, he thought, or maybe he always had been, and so he could admit this. “Luke’s right to be angry. You all are. But I was seventeen, and lost, and all my friends had left me. All I had left of them was our songs. And I stand by what I did with them. I’m sorry it hurts you now, but I’m not sorry for still believing I did the best I could.”

Even the figment of Reggie in his brain had nothing to say to that. Maybe that was gone, too. A short-lived hallucination. His therapist would be pleased.

The dented metal door behind him opened, and Julie Molina stepped into the alley. For a moment, silhouetted by the dim lights of the club, she looked like the avenging angel he had briefly thought her to be when he saw her at the Orpheum, the harbinger of his past finally catching up with him.

“He left a while ago.”

“I know.”

Trevor wondered if he should stand up, talk to her like the adult he was supposed to be, stand like an equal before this girl who used to be friends with his daughter and was now somehow his opposite. But in that moment he felt like he was seventeen again, and he couldn’t do it.

“I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, holding out a crumpled piece of paper. Trevor could see a snatch of Luke’s blocky handwriting.

He took it, even though he didn’t feel like he could do that either.

_“How’s that vegetarian lifestyle working out for you?”_

_That_ was Luke. That was the Luke he couldn’t conjure up in his brain, just like the Reggie he had probably conjured up all wrong. That right there was the proof that he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Life probably would have been easier if he had.

“You should come see us next Friday,” Julie said. Trevor could tell from her tone that the invitation wasn’t coming from her.

_Will Luke forgive me?_

_Maybe if you asked me to my face, jerk._

“Better not, I think.”

He, Trevor Wilson, a forty-two-year-old man, was done chasing down ghosts. He’d said what he needed to say, and Reggie had heard however much he wanted to hear, and Trevor was tired of enduring the stares of twenty-somethings wondering what a washed-up rock star was doing at a teen pop concert. If his past wanted to haunt him, it could come find him in the comfort of his own home.

Julie shrugged, too much like her mother, and that ached, too. “Nine pm.”

It was crazy to go. He knew it was. But then again, so was he.


End file.
